Often I walk over to the senate and see what my colleagues are doing there. On the way we must pass the Hall of Fame, great pictures in the Dome of the Capitol, and the old Supreme court, where the Court met before they entered the present ten-million-dollar palace, the most stupendous and expensive place of its kind in the world.

The controversy over the Supreme Court, in this year of our Lord 1937, causes great verbal thunder and reverberations. Nearly every speech one hears ends with a story of what our Founding Fathers thought.

That is the reason, I suppose, that when I walk over to the Senate, the picture of the Founding Fathers in the rotunda of the Capitol intrigues me most. It shows these Founding Fathers of ours standing around in very dignified and noble attitudes. They look uncomfortable, as if they were posing for their statues.

Pages, senators, representatives, old Negroes who have been here working in the Capitol over half a century, hurry past. Only the guides stop with my fellow Americans to see these statues and the great, still, cold forefathers.

The guide drones his lecture. People are in awe and ask practically no questions. Nor does the guide encourage any. He tells about the same story I heard back in 1917, except more worthies are in the Hall of Fame, and the Supreme Court has moved. The is a general tone of solemnity in these capital guides, and they try to be accurate. But there is a slight touch of the judge about them; they are a little arrogant.

Their spiel is all to show what grand guys were these founding Fathers of ours. They perorate vaguely about the Consitution and the Supreme Court.

A man next to me in the crowd is impressed. "They were certainly dignified in those days," he says, "it don't seem the kind of men you get in office now are like those fine old me."

I have talked to many capital sightseers. It seems that when our constituents mount a gallery and see their own representative in blood and bones, they get a terrible shock. Having seen since childhood the austere and noble gentlemen in pictures, and having confirmed their impression by seeing them solemnly hanging on the walls of the Capitol, they cannot realize that a human being can be a proper representative.
So let us most respectfully take our Founding Fathers apart. Were they in politics? Answer: they were up to their eyes and ears in politics at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Once in Philadelphia, they entered into a long term of matching wits, making shrewd trades, and compromising. Why not?

It had been done before. And it will ever be, so long as there is human nature.

So let us move along on the practical assumption that our institutions are human. And the first thing any person knows who has an inkwell of brains is that a government, a business, a family, is something that must work. No end of books have been written that indicate our Founding Fathers thought this or that, or intended this or that. What is the difference, honestly?

Our forefathers, whether they were radical or conservative, tried to establish a government that would work.

They had an awful mess on their hands. Commerce was bogged down, credit was rotten, money worthless, industry feeble, investments one big quesiton mark, farm markets restricted, and the farmers had as much blood in their eyes as they did just before the Revolution.

Government was not working. Therefore the delegates to the Constitutional Convention set about writing a political contract, so government would work.

And they were so intent on doing a businesslike job, they forgot all about liberty. Liberty, civil or religious, was the remotest thing from their minds. They had no Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

They finally finished their job, after long wrangling and rowing. They did it just exactly as people do in clubs, political conventions, and sewing circles. They did it in absolute, sworn secrecy, too.

They called the result of their labors a Constitution, and it was supposed to be a form of government, by means of which form the government could work. They did not fold their hands and whine and cry about rugged individualism.

Immediately a hue and cry was set up for a Bill of Rights, for the people not only wanted a government that worked, but they wanted liberty, too. So to get the business of government really started, and to give the people confidence, the Bill of Rights, entirely ignored by our forefathers, was tied on to the end, like the tail to a kite.

Viewing the Constitution, therefore, as a practical instrument, it seems to me that the only unalterable principles are that it shall work, that liberty shall be preserved, and that no specific prohibitions should be violated. In my mind, that is absolutely all there is to it. That is the reason that I feel like poking anyone, especially some legal representative of a big organization, when he talks about the unalterable principles of our forefathers—and suggest violation of the law.

The reason I think of these things is the same reason that every other American thinks of them. For since the President suggested the increase in the size of the Supreme Court, few have talked of anything else. In talking of the Constitution and the Supreme Court, I am trying to do so as sensibly as I know how.

After the controvery started, a friend of mine, Harold Strauss, of Covici Friede, my publishers, came down to Washington, to talk to me about my book—the one you are reading. I took him along with the tourists and showed him the statues and the pictures. Over to the Senate we walked. We went to the gallery.

Just as we entered, and this was on March 19, 1937, Senator Borah said loudly:

"The Senator from Illinois (Mr. Lewis) in his remarks on Wednesday used this sentence: 'Have we a government?' That (continues Borah) is what I should like to know."

Then, a little later on, as Mr. Strauss and I sat in the Gallery, we heard another able Senator, Mr. Black of Alabama, say:

"When we begin to try to find how it will be possible for the Federal Government to enact legislation which will tend to bring about, under the law, good order, good government, a method of approach which would restore peace to the nation, the only thing that has yet been suggested that can legally be done is to use the bayonet and gun."

A pretty situation, I think, here in 1937, to hear one man recognized as a great authority on the Constitution ask gravely whether we have a government; and another, equally able, ask what we can do to settle our economic problems except to use bayonets and guns!

We started out with bayonets and guns, back in 1776. Certainly, we do not want to use them again, for this time it will be on each other, as in the Civil War.

So we must maintain a stable, free, democratic government, that all men can understand. What has become of government?

If you are a lawyer, perhaps you can understand it. The Consitution gave us a government, but nowadays, when the people do something through the government, it is generally "unconstitutional."